A Bitter George Lucas Says He Sold Star Wars to 'the White Slavers'

You almost feel bad for George Lucas: He has to sit back and watch Disney take over his beloved franchise and crank out the biggest movie in the world right now. Critics and fans alike heap praise on a film that he has nothing to do with. Since he likens his $4 billion sale of Lucasfilm (which includes Star Wars) to a breakup, we could only compare what he's going through to dumping your partner and then watching that person become the ninth-highest box office performer of all time —$1.23 billion in global box office sales and counting—in just two weeks. And at this point, even though he made a ton of money with the sale and is still credited with creating the most successful sci-fi franchise of all time, he seems pretty bitter that he let it all go in a lengthy interview with Charlie Rose.

"It really does come down to a simple rule of life, which is when you break up with somebody the first rule is no phone calls. The second rule you don't go over to their house and drive by to see what they're doing. The third one is you don't show up to their coffee shop," Lucas said. "Every time you do something like that you're opening the wound again ... these were my kids. All of the Star Wars films. I loved them. I created them. I was very intimately involved in them. And I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and ..."

But he cuts himself off, and Rose doesn't ask what Lucas means by that. So we're left to draw our own conclusion, which can't be a positive one. He also criticized the movie, telling Rose that he had begun working on a script before he sold the series.

"They decided they didn't want to use those stories," he said. "They decided they were going to do their own thing. So I decided, 'Fine.' "

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And he wasn't happy with the end product.

"They wanted to do a retro movie," he said. "I don't like that. Every movie, I worked very hard to make them different, make them completely different with different planets, different spaceships, to make it new."

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